Posted
by
timothyon Friday December 07, 2012 @11:33PM
from the holy-grail-for-the-holidays dept.

jcreus writes "After struggling for some years with Nvidia cards (the laptop from which I am writing this has two graphic cards, an Intel one and Nvidia one, and is a holy mess [I still haven't been able to use the Nvidia card]) and, encouraged by Torvalds' middle finger speech, I've decided to ditch Nvidia for something better. I am expecting to buy another laptop and, this time, I'd like to get it right from the start. It would be interesting if it had decent graphics support and, in general, were Linux friendly. While I know Dell has released a Ubuntu laptop, it's way off-budget. My plan is to install Ubuntu, Kubuntu (or even Debian), with dual boot unfortunately required." So: what's the state of the art for out-of-the-box support?

I have an Ivy Bridge laptop. What's so nice about it? How much time has passed since the hardware release? I still have tearing artifacts around every title bar on KDE, all because of bugs in drivers - both with Ubuntu's default driver and the one from PPA.

It's all great that their drivers are open and free, but quality-wise they have always been a mess.

At this point, if you want a great out-of-the-box support, all you can do is wait. Either when Intel will improve their quality, or when nvidia fixes their optimus stuff. Don't know much about the AMD side of things.

Intel drivers by far and away have been the best for as long as I can remember. Not the slightest hint of a problem on an RHEL6 clone. I can't even begin to imagine how you can have "tearing" on a static image. Sounds like hardware problems to me.

That's a problem with your implementation. I have a Sandy Bridge laptop, and have never seen any hint of problem, using either Unity/3D or E17's built-in compositor with OpenGL support. Similarly, I have never noticed a problem running OpenGL-based games such as TuxKart.

Well, AMD is looking good too, with currently shipping Fusion parts for laptops all being Evergreen or Northern Islands, both supported by the open source xorg Radeon driver, with a few exceptions such as full screen antialiasing, which seems to be getting close but currently requires the Catalyst driver. See here [x.org] for the current xorg driver state. Notice that everything you need for 2D and 3D graphics is there, up to but not including Southern Islands. Just taking a quick look around, it looks like the latest budget AMD laptops are Trinity, which is Northern Islands, which should work fine with the current Xorg driver. But definitely google the specific chipset. Power management... good question. I'm getting solid results with Ivy Bridge, I haven't tried AMD's laptop parts recently.

I believed this jazz and bought an AMD/ATI laptop after being bitten by nVidia's optimus comment (my nvidia laptop got stolen). Now I miss my nvidia laptop. The Radeon driver is really lacking, has a very high battery consumption, doesn't work well with many applications. The fglrx (proprietary) driver won't work with several Xorg version without that considered a major bug by the dev team.

It is very possible that right now, if you want pure open source, Intel may be the one offering the most supported punch. I will really consider this option for my next one. I wonder if CUDA can be done with intel cards.

The alternative is to use bumblebee on nvidia proprietary driver, which drains battery but allows to enjoy a decent graphical acceleration.

OpenCL is supported by all major vendors, and it can be used both on CPU and on GPU. However, Intel's support for OpenCL on GPU is only available on Windows. Until the GalliumComute framework is ready, we won't be seeing any open source OpenCL support anywhere. (Also, Intel's GPUs support OpenCL only from HD4000 series).

Thanks for that. You would think the top 500 guys would be anxious to get this on Linux and put some muscle behind it, wouldn't you? Or maybe they already are. There are a few big clusters running Radeon GPUs.

I believed this jazz and bought an AMD/ATI laptop after being bitten by nVidia's optimus comment (my nvidia laptop got stolen). Now I miss my nvidia laptop. The Radeon driver is really lacking, has a very high battery consumption, doesn't work well with many applications. The fglrx (proprietary) driver won't work with several Xorg version without that considered a major bug by the dev team.

This has been my experience as well. AMD's linux driver is very woeful at the moment and they have shown VERY little sign of even caring. Just check the number of issues reported at cchtml.com, which AMD have been shown to read and even respond to, but are still unfixed and not even slated to be fixed any time soon. I hear the open source driver is making leaps and bounds but it's still not as polished as Intel's.

The alternative is to use bumblebee on nvidia proprietary driver, which drains battery but allows to enjoy a decent graphical acceleration.

I use this currently, and it actually works pretty well. Muxless gpu switching is a godsend

Which means the Optimus solution isn't actually all that bad. I have the opposite viewpoint: I bought an Optimus laptop assuming the nvidia wouldn't work, simply for the other specs and the Intel video. When it turned out that bumblebee worked fairly painlessly and I was able to use the nvidia to accelerate 3D while the Intel drove my displays, I was pleasantly surprised. The solution is a bit of a hack, but honestly, I don't really have anything bad to say about it. It's the best of both worlds: open Intel drivers which are stable and support modern interfaces like XRandR 1.3 and KMS driving the displays, and the clunky proprietary but fast nvidia driver sandboxed in its own backgrond X server doing 3D acceleration only.

I honestly have to agree with the ease of setting up Bumblebee. When I bought my current laptop online, it was advertised as nVidia graphics, and nowhere did it mention intel... so I was disappointed (and quite confused) to find X using the intel driver. I had never heard of this Optimus thing, and 5 minutes later, I had bumblebee installed, and running.

I came here to pretty much say this. I actually got an Alienware M11XR2 for free (it was purchased by my work for an executive who decided he hated it, and nobody else wanted such a small laptop so it was given to me as a play box). I stuck Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it, installed Bumblebee after a bit of research and it works fantastically well. I play FlightGear and Diaspora on it frequently, and just got into the Steam for Linux beta. I haven't had any issues with it at all.

While I agree it's not an optimal solution (groan... oh the pun, the pun!) it works really well. I have just modified the launchers in my start menu to call/usr/bin/optirun when I have a 3D accelerated app installed. Just for the record I run Gnome-Shell instead of Unity because I seriously can't stand it, and editing the menu items is easier.

Interestingly, that extra step is really not that different to what I do on my Windows laptop which has a newer Optimus chipset (Dell E6430); more often than not I have to go and modify the launchers in the start menu to make sure they use the Optimus chipset to run instead of the Intel. Although I do also use the Nvidia control panel for that.

Hmm... maybe all that's missing is a control panel item for Bumblebee... I might have to break out my Python/GTK skills and throw one together:)

Intel graphics and wifi has a good Linux reputation. Atom was an exception because they used a 3rd party GPU (PowerVR).

Thinkpad with a full Intel stack (CPU, graphics, wifi, SSD) is the preferred route. I prefer the T430 (14") or X230 (12"). The biggest draw back is low resolution (1600x900 or 1366x768). You may want to look into the X1 Carbon as well.

If cost is an issue, I would choose an X220 or T420. I actually prefer the older models as they have 7-row, traditional Thinkpad keyboard vs the newer 6-row c

If 1600x900 is too low, look no farther than the T530... a little bit bigger, but only very slightly heavier (not really noticable if both machines have a 9-cell battery installed) than the T430, and the screen is fantastic (MUCH better than the T430 1600x900 screens). 1080p, great color reproduction, extremely bright, high contrast, and very wide viewing angles as far as TN panels go. Now if only there was a 2560x1440 version...:D

Interesting. I've always had lots of trouble with Intel graphics, but never any trouble with Nvidia. My current (2 year old) Dell laptop has an FX 1800. It really kicks tail compared to the newest ones some of my coworkers are using. Their (also Dell) laptops have Intel graphics (don't know which).

Or buy from a company that allows you to customize every aspect of the laptop. I have an Eurocom Racer http://web.eurocom.com/EC/ec_model_config1%281,219,0%29 with Radeon HD6970M graphics. You almost can't get better non-Nvidia mobile graphics than that. Got it with no OS installed, and it runs xubuntu like a champ.

What do you mean by "decent linux graphics support"? I have a Thinkpad with NVidia NVS 3100M discrete graphics and 512mb vram. I'm perfectly content with it for what I do, which includes 3d molecular modelling. KDE looks great, too. On the other hand I don't play any 3d games so I can't tell you what Call of Duty 12 or any of those look like on here. I would sooner write code in CUDA for the GPU than do that.R
In other words, your sense of "decent linux graphics support" might not be the same as everyone else.

Probably means "a machine that works". I use Linux at work and I started out with an older ATI card. What a mess, ended up putting in a cheap Nvidia card and that cleared up most, but not all, of my problems. Strange things still happen - like inverted colors in flash. Sure it can (and has) been fixed but I personally don't want to waste my time with such things.

Overall, I would say that Linux drivers generally suck when it comes to video cards. The one exception is Intel as the newer iSeries CPUs

Your experience does seem a little out of date. Try a Radeon 6450 for example, it's solid as a rock under both the open source and Catalyst drivers and for $40 you can't complain about the performance.

Assuming he means "with Bios and drive support for 7 years" the Lenovo is the only choice. I have a T61p and use it for PCB layout (as well as OpenOffice and Opera).

I also have a T43p from 2006, and just downloaded upgrades of all the stuff needed for a new Windows 7 professional install (for compatibility with the two family members who don't use Ubuntu). It was in daily use with XP till a week ago! I guess it will be another 7 years before it gets Win8, unless OpenBSD replaces Microsoft by then!

I had that card too. I was planning to use my Thinkpad as a desktop replacement, but I couldn't watch video on the second screen because of NVidia's TwinView tech. They set the refresh rate of the second monitor to something bonkers in software (but the actual DVI connection works at the correct rate), so video and even desktop effects suffer from quite bad tearing artifacts on the second monitor. This was between 1 and 2 years ago , it may have improved since then.

It sounds like our experiences are similar. I'm on a Thinkpad 530w, with the dual intel invidia cards. I went through the hassle of setting up bumblebee when I first got it (and pulled down the latest intel drivers as it was too new for the repository to have support) but have been just using the intell drivers since the latest rebuild as they haven't been a problem for anything I'm doing.*...but more to the point, what molecular modelling? I'm off in neurobio these days (and have been doing softbodied bio

Have you looked at System76? They make laptops preloaded with Ubuntu. www.system76.com

I just ordered one from The Linuxlaptop [thelinuxlaptop.com]. It's basically a Dell Inspiron. I could have gotten it faster and paid a little less directly from Dell, but I'm getting lazy, I want to just turn it on and have it work. I think, from now on I will only order from companies that pre-install Linux. It says something about their commitment.

I've been developing on a System 76 for about a year and a half now (the then Serval model). I absolutely love it. I've become hooked on the finger print scanner for sudo commands. The only problem that I recall having was trying to upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 for Ubuntu. A bunch-o-things got all fubar. Reinstalling 12.04 worked like a charm and my overall experience got even better than before. I ended up having to put a windows dual boot on it for some windows/mac only video conferencing software for work, and System 76 provided all the drivers to make the windows installation work as expected. The bizarre "windows experience index" gave me a seven point something which is apparently good. I highly recommend System 76, but I have yet to try the other vendors.

System76 gives good support. They aren't the cheapest option out there though.

If your goal is not to play 3D games, then Intel HD graphics have by far the best open-source support and HD 4000 graphics are actually pretty good overall. If your goal is to play games, then Nvidia or AMD with proprietary drivers will be your best bet, with the edge in driver quality going to Nvidia.

AMD does have some open source support *BUT* the 7000 series cards (meaning everything released in the last year) are extremely poorly supported with AMD only having released part of the necessary documentation so far (and it took them 10 months to release the part that is out there....).

1a. You haven't specified exactly what you'll be doing: if it's just office crap, anything will do; but if you'll be running the GIMP, games, etc, you'll need higher-end hardware (both CPU and GPU).

1b. Do you need x86/x64? If not, a Chromebook or tablet with USB-OTG and hub may be an answer; unfortunately, the below blob problem still applies.

2. For GPUs there are two kinds of drivers: reverse-engineered and proprietary blobs; you almost certainly know this. NVIDIA is the king of the blob department, AMD/ATI is middle of the road, and Intel (along with older stuff like SiS) is mostly completely reverse-engineered or even released open. Bear in mind, the open drivers are messy: based on the state of the art, graphics is by far the most difficult thing to reverse engineer a driver for, and I really feel for the guys working on them! (Edit: AMD/ATI's blobs are well known for being a mess, too!)

Bottom line: if RMS can barely get a machine to his liking, you'll have only a marginally less difficult time. Sorry.

Unlike system76, ZaReason, and every other f'ing company there trying to fix the mess. ThinkPenguin's been working with Atheros for instance on getting the complete source for a USB wifi chipset. That'll bring us the first truly Linux friendly USB adapter which is fully supported. There are two other older USB chipsets which are also not dependent on non-free software. The older N chipset has issues with some routers (then again it's really pre-N so that is to be expected) and the G chipset is well supported provided you stick to browsing the web and don't venture off to setup your own access point.

Anyway. Back to ThinkPenguin. The company has a number of laptops at a variety of prices points that anybody can afford. They are starting at $500 and you can throw any distribution on them just about because the company doesn't depend on pieces that are outside the mainline kernel and/or other major projects nor proprietary. And to make you feel better they are HUGE contributors to free software. 25% of there profits go to Trisquel and other projects as well. They are also working on numerous initiatives to better support people around the world. For instance there manufacturing keyboards for a dozen languages/regions and have brought support for lots of other hardware to the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe (as well as elsewhere).

They sound like a great company, and paying $500 for a laptop isnt much if you can be sure you arent getting crap/unsupportable hardware in the deal. I will keep them in mind for my next purchase but... at the moment they dont seem to be shipping anything with ECC so I guess I will have to build my next purchase myself like usual.

They sell 3 laptops. All three have only a 1366x768 rez. For a "high-end" boutique dealer that's a joke. 1600x1050 minimum and 1920x1080 preferred or no deal. I don't care if everything else is perfect.

Personally, got a 17" HP 1920x1080 with i3 SandyBridge about 1 year ago and everything works. ArchLinux is rock solid and the Intel drivers have been stable. LAN / Wifi worked out of the box as well as the webcam which suprised me. It was about $600 give or take. My $.02

If you don't need a gaming rig or 3d video editing, stear away from anything with a nvidia optimus setup as it's not supported and personally, the ATI stuff isn't all that much better then Intel and the Intel drivers are top notch from a open source perspective.

Yes, Linus gave Nvidia the middle finger, and from a certain perspective it was for a good reason, but from another perspective, it's just "ranting".

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

ATI/AMD is in the same boat. They have proprietary drivers. Arguably, Nvidia drivers are better. In my experience the ATI/AMD drivers tend to have more bugs. They also have a tendency to release support for a new xorg-server well after the server has been released, thus forcing those of us on the bleeding edge to wait. On the otherhand, they help support the open source drivers, which is great. But, the open source drivers lag behind, so if you're a gamer and dual boot to Windows and have a great ATI/AMD card, it may not work properly under the Linux open source drivers or with a bleeding edge distro with the latest and greatest xorg-server.

Otherwise, if you want "gamer-grade" graphics, you basically have a choice between Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Both have their tradeoffs.

If you don't care about gamer-grade graphics cards, Intel drivers are open source, well maintained, and the new sandy bridge and ivy bridge graphics are more than good enough for almost anything but gaming (they're okay for low to mid-low end gaming but that's about it).

My solution is a thinkpad w520 with optimus graphics. I use optimus graphics under windows when I want to game (quadro 2000m) and use the integrated intel graphics for linux with bbswitch to disable the nvidia gpu so my battery life doesn't suck. But it really does boil down to, do you want to game? If so, you have no choice but a proprietary driver or not-up-to-snuff open source driver. If not, stick with onboard Intel. Decent graphics performance and much better battery life than most discrete solutions.

Don't forget, NVidia are great for supporting older hardware... at least a LOT better than ATI/AMD.ATI/AMD has dropped the HD4200 series cards as of something like 6+ months ago from the newer drivers. NVidia on the other hand still supports a huge range of older cards, and supports VDPAU on pretty much anything from the last few years at the very least.

For non-gaming needs the radeon driver works out well for most cards though, so it's a trade off. And the X.org boys are ( or at least have been, I haven't been following too close lately ) working on getting VDPAU working on the HD4XXX+ hardware with the radeon driver.

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

Nvidia Optimus cards aren't even usable in Linux until the Bumblebee project reinvented support for the Optimus stuff on their own. If that's not complete *crap* on Nvidia's part, then I don't even know what we can call crap.

No, not true - you can certainly use Optimus cards on Linux, you just have to choose between the integrated chipset or the dedicated chipset at boot time. What you don't get is the power savings from being able to dynamically switch between the low-power integrated Intel gfx and the high performance NVidia gfx. It's really not that big of a deal - the battery life on my thinkpad is just fine using the NVidia gfx 100% of the time.

"...the battery life on my thinkpad is just fine using the NVidia gfx 100% of the time."

Unless you need more than a few hours of battery life at a time. I've been buying solely Intel graphics based Thinkpads for a few years now, and currently I no longer need to carry a power supply with me... the 9-cell in my T520 lasts all day (from about 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM when I get home, with a few short breaks for lunch and such... I use public transit, so it's usually in use during transit as well). Can't see doing t

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

Unfortunately that does, indeed, mean they are crap. It makes them *impossible* to troubleshoot or support and it also means they wont even run at all on many linux systems! It's hard to imagine what one could possibly do to produce something that is more 'crap' than that.

the problems with the open source drivers are in the areas of performance and power management. As for performance, I don't actually know, I have to take other people's word for it. I have an AMD desktop card and Linux native games work brilliantly, but there seems to be a problem with almost every Wine game.

Power management is limited on the open source driver. You can choose between performance profiles for power saving and performance (hot, loud and fast), one in between and one adaptive profile. The thr

And check the "little things" and not just main support. For example, I have this little Acer Aspire One (AO756) that I like a lot. It has a celeron processor and linux runs on it well. EXCEPT: I've tried everything I can and there seems to be no way to get an external microphone to work (it has a combo jack, like a cellphone). Also, the SD card slot does not work in Linux either. Both of these things work fine in the Windows 7 that the machine came installed with.

Indeed, the Toshiba laptop I just got in a trade is 99.9% supported in GNU/Linux. That 0.1% is the headphone jack; with pure ALSA it simply doesn't work, and with PulseAudio it works but has to be manually switched when I plug in my 'phones or external speakers. Also, with Pulse I get a nasty static from time to time and the only cure is to reboot (I've tried stopping and starting the sound system and no dice).

Of course, the fact that the Intel HD graphics are fully supported is really great. Still, it's th

I would be tempted to buy a cheap chromebook [yes the ARM one] for $200, which allegedly run ubuntu very nicely. I would probably be tempted to either they drop in price to get rid of the old stock, or buy one of the new versions that come with a touchscreen next year.

As far as I can tell, the newest Acer Chrome-book is nearly the same computer as their celeron-based Aspire-One computers. I have one of those and as far as I can tell, the computers are nearly identical. So I'm suspecting it should be easy to put any flavor of Linux on it, since it doesn't appear to be an ARM computer.

Chromebook already runs a specialized version of Gentoo, which you can unlock in Dev mode and run (http://georgemcbay.blogspot.com/2012/10/go-on-samsung-arm-chromebook_25.html). For dual boot, you can just run a version of Linux on a USB stick (http://www.chromebook-linux.com/2011/11/booting-gnulinux-distribution-from-usb.html).

If you can wait awhile longer before buying, Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is reported to have significantly improvied graphics performance [myce.com], and Intel GPUs are well-supported with free drivers in Linux and Xorg. They're less-powerful than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but should be fine unless you need to play high-end games on high quality settings.

If you can wait awhile longer before buying, Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is reported to have significantly improvied graphics performance [myce.com], and Intel GPUs are well-supported with free drivers in Linux and Xorg. They're less-powerful than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but should be fine unless you need to play high-end games on high quality settings.

Yes, and than wait another year or so until they get the drivers to work properly, which they still didn't with Sandy Bridge.

I recently had this issue with my Slackware install on a brand new Thinkpad. I can't vouch for all systems, but on mine I was able to tell the BIOS to disable Optimus and use ONLY the Nvidia chip. It was a really simple work around. Although, I did have to use the Intel graphics during installation. But once I rebooted from the installer, I was able to switch the BIOS to the Nvidia chip and have been using it ever since with Nvidia's drivers. I'd like the power savings of the Optimus feature, but that

my MacBook Pro does an outstanding job of running Linux. You can dual boot it or run Linux in VMware or Virtual Box. No graphics card issues at all. Everything worked right out of the gate - sound, graphics, wireless, everything. If you can, try and find one a few years old. The new ones have those soldered on chips that make it impossible to upgrade. Get an SSD, take out the DVD, put in a second HD and you're off to the races.

my MacBook Pro does an outstanding job of running Linux. You can dual boot it or run Linux in VMware or Virtual Box. No graphics card issues at all. Everything worked right out of the gate - sound, graphics, wireless, everything. If you can, try and find one a few years old. The new ones have those soldered on chips that make it impossible to upgrade. Get an SSD, take out the DVD, put in a second HD and you're off to the races.

Actually, all you need are the ones that lack the "Retina" display. Apple still makes regular plain old Macbook Pros (13" and 15") with fully upgradable everything. Just avoid the MacBook Pro with Retina display and you're fine. You don't want it anyhow - running at native resolution is a good way to strain your eyes. And running non-native looks ugly on any OS other than OS X (Try running 1920x1200 on it - it'll look practically native on OS X, and ugly as heck on any other OS).

So stick with the traditional line and you'll be fine. Easiest way to tell is because they still come with optical drives.

No reason to not get the latest tech, especially as Apple is still manufacturing them.

Unfortunately there's a big difference between a sheet of paper and a backlit LCD screen.

Yes, one is backlit and the other isn't. What is your point? I hate being able to see the pixels on either. Do you actually believe that being able to see the pixels helps readability and reduces eye strain?

Note also that the resolution of what you term "professional offset printing" is often lower than the raw DPI because of the use of halftones or a patterns of dots to simulate the appearance of gray. A magazine picture printed at 1200 DPI may well have a resolution merely equivalent to a 300 DPI photograph printed using traditional analog film processing techniques.

Beyond 300DPI there are diminishing returns, but the jump from 100DPI of a typical screen to a "retina display" is certainly visible.

As long as you don't have an objection to running KDE, Plasma runs just fine on the Retina displays as the window components are resolution independent. It is the only workspace I know of that is unfortunately, but I've been running it for a while on my MBP and have zero issues. Looks fantastic.

I've worked extensively with ATI, Nvida, and Intel Linux laptops and unfortunately there is no ideal solution. First, you need to decide whether you need open source or proprietary drivers. Proprietary drivers give vastly superior performance and expose the most OpenGL features. If you want support for the life of your laptop, be aware that manufactures will drop support after a few years as was done with my ATI X1800.

The open source drivers tend to give the solid 2D experience and have great support for wayland and compiz. You also don’t have to worry about kernel updates breaking your drivers. With open drivers forget about and serious gaming. OpenGL performance is still terrible compared to proprietary drivers. Intel has the best open source drivers. If you need more performance than an integrated GPU can deliver, ATI has the 2nd best open drivers.TL:DR Propriatary -> Nvidia, Open -> Intel or ATI

I recently converted a 2008 vintage Compaq and a newer AMD 64+Nvidia graphics laptop to Ubuntu.

The older laptop required editing a file in/etc to force an alternate video driver to load. The other laptop works best with a driver named nvidia.

What worked for me was refreshing my memory by reading the classic explanation of how a Debian Linux loads drivers, noting a few key filenames, and doing the few simple steps to switch video drivers and restart the computer. After writing it down on a sheet of paper, s

Coming at this from the other side... as someone involved in tech support (as a volunteer), we've recently had an issue that only shows up with the 3.5 kernels and the Catalyst driver. My own distro isn't using 3.5 kernels yet - the people reporting this were all using one of the latest *buntu versions. Since the original question was about Ubuntu, all I can say is be very careful. If the current LTS version doesn't have the 3.5 kernel yet, then go with that and avoid the issue.

if you're aim is to go for fast 3D, your range of choice is narrowed down to either ATI or nVidia. and, nVidias drivers are the better one.

yes, they are closed source, etc., but still they work.

no open source driver for these cards produces a sufficient level of performance. and, they lack a lot of features that are important for laptops. for example, the open source ATI drivers doesn't scale the GPU clock, which means your GPU will run at 100% all the time, your battery will get drained with it real fast (

I do not have any issues with my Nvidia+Intel setup, aside from some mishaps when I upgrade my Linux kernel (Bumblebee sometimes becomes a zombie kernel module, which won't unload, and that isn't fun).

There is Nouveau if you hate closed-source or something, but it has a lot of issues right now that should be resolved in the future: namely, that it doesn't support setting the clock rate of the GPU, so the GPU always runs at boot clock speeds by default. This means that your out-of-the-box performance with No

There are several makers of Linux laptops, at this point:I've had great experiences buying from ZaReason [zareason.com], I know people who have had great experiences buying from System76 [system76.com], and ThinkPenguin [www.thinkpenguing] is another option.

My wife has a ZaReason Alto 4330 [zareason.com] that she loves even more than the Thinkpad X-series that it replaced.

For work, I've had several ZaReason machines--including some Alto 3880 [zareason.com] laptops (the previous generation of what my wife now has). We got the Altos with 8-way multiprocessing (4-core + hyperthreading) and gobs of RAM, with run-times of 3-4 hours on a single charge and weight just over 4 lbs; they've made fantastic developers' laptops for us.

And, for what you get, the ZaReason machines aren't even that expensive (seriously--a monster-power Alto is only ~$1k).

If you ask for it, the computers even come with whatever username you want setup--you don't even have to fill your name into the account; you just turn the computers on and use them (if you don't ask for it, they infer it from the name on the order).

As I understand it from my friends, System 76 is basically the same way, except that they're Ubuntu only.

I recently bought a Clevo P170EM with a hybrid Intel HD 4000/Radeon 7970M setup. The Intel card was supported perfectly in Linux out of the box. Getting support for the 7970M took a few months, but the most recent Catalyst release supports it under Ubuntu 12.04, and setup was relatively painless. The only minor hassle of this setup is the need to restart the X server to switch the active card. I understand 12.10 is a little dicier due to the new version of X, and I don't know about any other distros, but I've been running this setup for a few months now without any problems and can highly recommend it. If the P170EM is too big, the P150EM is essentially the same hardware with a smaller screen. Every other hardware component except the fingerprint reader works perfectly in Ubuntu as well.

System76 also sells machines with Ubuntu pre-installed, and they recently introduced a model with discrete graphics, so you could also look into either their computers or the Clevo computers upon which their models are based (I believe the Bonobo, their discrete-graphicsed model, is based on the P370EM).

Go fuck yourself. VMWare is a great solution for running Windows, because Windows is a shit OS that does not belong on hardware. No one should have to run another OS and build a fake environment just to be able to run Linux.

Why would you have to be "pure"? Is it some kind of religion? If someone runs Windows on the metal and Linux in VM, and that kind of setup it works for him, that's fine.

ATI, where the open drivers are a little better, but the closed ones needed for most stuff don't even provide all functionalities of the open ones, and yeah, they crash a lot too.

Smells like FUD, it must be FUD. Catalyst has never crashed on me, even once, in a few years of using it. The main annoyance is, you need to reinstall on every kernel update, which is why I now use the Xorg Radeon driver. Less than half the 3D performance, but that's still more performance than I need. 3D cards are ridiculously powerful these days.

What universe is this where the nvidia blobs induces crashes on even a semi-regular basis? I can't remember the last time video caused my system to hang/crash and I've been using the nvidia blob for at least 6 years.

Unfortunately this is exactly what you can expect with blobware support. Some people get lucky with the correct combination of software and hardware and it will seem to work perfectly. So you wonder why others complain. Well, they arent using the exact same software and hardware you are, and binaries are brittle. They break. One machine may work fine with blob drivers for a long time. A slightly different system may experience regular crashes. A more radically different system may not be able to run the blo

So do I. The trick is to know what's really important and what is less important and choose your compromises accordingly. For instance it's better to deal with slightly less stunning 3d performance in order to avoid relying on blobware, rather than the other way around.

What fighting is necessary with Intel? The last time I can recall Intel video being buggy in GNU/Linux was with trying to set up KMS on an older kernel that didn't fully support it. It's all done automatically now in most distros.

I'm going with the consensus here: If you want good open source drivers, go Intel. If you want good 3D support and don't care about open source, go Nvidia. If you want half-assed open and closed drivers at the same time, go AMD/ATI.

You mean that crap, with a proprietary X-Window app, which requires about 30 clicks to switch monitor? My wife hates it, she can't even figure out how to switch screen, and I always have to help here with this stupid interface. And no, she's not stupid, the problem really is the stupid software.

On the other side, with my laptop running an intel chipset, I just plug the laptop to the TV, and... that's it! I don't even have to do a single click, my desktop resizes on the laptop screen (to match the one of

It only makes sense that those using a FOSS operating system would have problems with closed drivers, and it is silly of you to try to dismiss them out of hand with the term "rabid". But I am wondering, what is it that drew you to Linux if it wasn't openess?

SSD, gobs of RAM, lots of CPU power, nice bright screen with high resolution... all of these things belong on a laptop because they're useful in places where you can only use a laptop, without significantly reducing battery life or being useless 80% of the time.

High powered gaming graphics, on the other hand, belong in desktops or luggable workstations... or in an eGPU unit.

Depends on what you use your laptop for, again. If you're playing games or doing 3d content creation, you do, definitely, still need a powerful chipset. Yes, especially on the road. Intel does not cut it. For most users, I might agree with you, but most is not all so "doing it wrong" hardly applies to everybody. You could just as easily say your average user does not need 8GB or ram, must less 16, so going over 4GB is always "doing it wrong". Different people have different requirements.

You should always ask yourself whether you really need to be playing games or doing 3D content creation on a device with a very small thermal envelope, limited power consumption and limited screen space... eventually you'll reach the point where it's easier to put a desktop in every room and just lug a hot-swappable hard drive or sync everything.

And apart from gaming, a lot of the high-horsepower stuff is easily done on a workstation via RDP...:)

So you are saying that unless you are lazy and willing to do research it is best to avoid Lenovo all together? If that is the case it is truly a shame because Thinkpad is the first thing that comes to mind when Linux support is important.